May Day mayhem

>> Last year's protest in Westmount creates a municipal court mess

by CRAIG SEGAL

On May 1, 2000, 24-year-old David Marquis stepped off a yellow school bus in Westmount for a breakaway May Day protest. He and 200 mostly French kids--many of them students like him--waved signs and shouted anti-capitalist slogans in the street. Within 10 minutes police arrested them and threw them in prison for up to 24 hours.

"There was at least one cop for every two activists," says the long-haired sociology student. "As soon as the buses stopped, the cops surrounded us." A year later police are charging 125 kids--minus Jaggi Singh, whose charges were recently dropped--with criminal offences such as illegal assembly.

But the defence team of four lawyers is trying an unusual argument to get the case chucked out of court, one that may have far-reaching implications. Defence argues the judge himself is biased because of a lawsuit he recently launched against the provincial government.

Judge Keith Ham belongs to a group of 40 municipal judges who are suing the Quebec government over the new municipal merger bill, Bill 170. Ham's group claims the megacity mergers threaten the independence of judges in Montreal municipalities.

In court last Friday, defence lawyers for the May Day demonstrators read a passage from Judge Ham's own lawsuit back to him. Ham and his colleagues charge that the mergers will close many municipal courts, killing off the jobs of many municipal judges. They argue that municipal judges may make judgments that brown-nose their superiors to keep their jobs. And that's never supposed to happen because judges aren't supposed to have superiors.

The case also calls the judge selection process "discriminatory, arbitrary, and defective" and claims three conditions that guarantee judges' independence--financial security, job security and institutional independence--are affected by the impending merger. "If your continued status as a judge depends on whether the government is happy with the judgements you render, then you're no longer independent," says the activists' defence lawyer William Sloan.

Despite the judges' case, Sloan thinks the merger will actually have a balancing effect on the scales of justice. "Eventually having one universal court system for all of these criminal matters would be better than what we have now.

"In private, every lawyer who practices in municipal courts will tell you the same infraction will be punished in a different fashion depending on which municipal court you're in," Sloan says. "Some courts, where there are large shopping centres that make up a big tax base, for example, tend to punish shoplifting much more severely than a court with no big shopping centres around."

As for the actual police charges against the activists, defence lawyers say they're bogus. "I know the cops are lying. That's pretty clear," says lawyer Pascal Lescarbeau. "They contradict each other all the time.

"It's political," Lescarbeau adds. "It's a demonstration by poor people in a rich city. Police are there to protect the rich. Police work very often for rich people."

Lescarbeau cites a recent protest in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve where police did not arrest as quickly as they did in Westmount. "Activists broke everything and police waited for two hours to intervene and it was 100 times worse than in Westmount. In Westmount they barely let them protest for 10 minutes."